Bush firm on June 30 handover deadline

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The US President, George Bush, made a rare pilgrimage to Capitol Hill to massage Republicans worried about the Administration's course in Iraq, infighting over next year's federal budget and their prospects for re-election in November.

In a 45-minute pep talk in a basement conference room at the Capitol on Thursday, Mr Bush told more than 200 Republican senators and members of the House of Representatives that the US was firmly committed to transferring power to the Iraqis on June 30 and insisted that the temporary government would not be under US control.

Mr Bush said the new US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, would not be a de facto successor to Paul Bremer, the senior US civilian administrator in the country, who is to step down on July 1. Mr Bush took no questions at the closed meeting.

His assurances come at a time when Europeans and Iraqis are growing increasingly sceptical of Washington's intentions.

"He said, you know, that John Negroponte is not replacing Jerry Bremer," a Republican senator, Rick Santorum, said after the session. "What's replacing Jerry Bremer is a sovereign Iraqi government."

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Mr Bush did not mention the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, calls for the resignation of the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, or the raid by what witnesses said were Iraqi and US authorities on the Baghdad offices and home of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader whom Washington once embraced.

While Republicans publicly rallied around Mr Bush, the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, unleashed some of her toughest criticism yet of him.

"I believe that the President's leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgement and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers," she said.

Meanwhile, the House has overwhelmingly approved $US447 billion ($635 billion) in military spending that includes an extra $US25 billion Mr Bush sought to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan until early next year.